A second chance
by FourLights
Summary: Set right at the end of PA. Hermione is trying to decide whether or not to keep the Time-Turner after her third year at Hogwarts, when she receives some advice from a most unexpected visitor...


_This was written as an answer to a writing challenge in a HP fan community. It was originally written in a different language, so some things may be lost and/or sound weird in translation (so please let me know if you notice anything not sounding right!). The thing I tried to do here is tell a here-is-what-happened type of story, without going into much detail, although the temptation to go into detail was nearly unbearable at times._

_Hermione Granger and everyone mentioned herein, together with the events of "the original timeline", belong to their creator, J. K. Rowling. The dialogue at the end is an exact quotation from "The Prisoner of Azkaban." I own nothing except some "what-if" imagination. Enjoy the story and please review :)_

* * *

Just before starting for the Great Hall for breakfast, Hermione placed the Time-Turner back in her hourglass-shaped pendant lay peacefully in its small oblong box, its job for this school year done. Hermione had packed it together with the rest of her baggage at first - but later, suddenly unsure, after some troubling words of advice Professor McGonagall had given her, had taken it out. Since then, she'd been unable to make a decision.

McGonagall had expressed a concern about her intention to keep going at the same pace. Hermione couldn't deny it - she had obviously taken a somewhat larger bite that she could chew. She had nearly gone hysterical with all the stress and exhaustion this year. On the other hand, she had the whole summer to rest now, and besides, the Time-Turner had proven incredibly useful - and for things far more important than her study plan, too. After all, she didn't really need Muggle Studies. It would be nice if she could keep the device and use it only for the important stuff... There was no way, unfortunately, to give up her double lessons AND keep the Time-Turner. If she wanted to keep it, she needed a good reason, and it wouldn't do to tell Macgonagall she wanted it for the purpose of fixing the past when necessary. So now she had to choose what she wanted more - the advantage of being able to help put things right now and then, at the price of another whole year living on the edge of madness, or a normal life with the advantage gone.

She sighed. Thinking logically, she could give it up at any time if she decided she couldn't handle it. She didn't need to hand it in immediately. She could keep her options open. After all, it would be selfish, just because she was feeling a little tired, to give up such a useful tool - useful not only to herself, but to her friends too: with the way Harry seemed to be a magnet for trouble, every additional advantage they could get had to be treasured. Of course, she would have to take some effort to make it absolutely clear - to Ronald, especially - that it would be used only in emergencies, and as a last resort - with someone's life at stake, or something no less important. No cheating at exams or lottery, which, sadly, would certainly be the first obvious uses for the Time-Turner Ron would come up with. She could almost hear herself and Ron screaming at each other in the heat of the argument which was almost inevitably coming...

She realized, then, that it seemed she was leaning towards deciding to keep the thing. Even if she had to endure a whole year of Ron's tantrums, or have him not speaking to her again... Perhaps she could keep it a secret. Perhaps there would be no need to use it at all... Apart from her studies of course... Hopefully, there would be no need to use it... But really, how _did_ you give up something like this?.

She was moving to leave the room when a strangely familiar voice stopped her.

"Wait," the voice said, behind her. Hermione turned on her heels, startled. She had been alone in the room a second ago. She was certain of it. And yet there was someone else in there now, sitting on the edge of her bed. A woman, not exactly old, but not a girl, either. Close to her mother's age, perhaps. The stranger seemed deadly tired, her skin had a grayish tint and her right eye, the only one Hermione could see, had a deep dark circle underneath. Her hair was cropped short, except for a long bit of fringe on the left, covering half her face.

Hermione had her wand out in a split second, but the woman radiated no threat, and didn't even move to make a defensive gesture.

"You must give up the Time-Turner," she said, at exactly the same time when Hermione shot, "Who are you, and how did you get here?" Then the stranger's words caught up, and Hermione gasped, "What?"

The woman stood up and made a couple of short steps toward her. Hermione raised her wand. The woman stopped.

"Don't you know me, Hermione Granger?"

Her voice was coarse, heavy with exhaustion.

Hermione stared at her face. The hair falling over half of it was preventing her from taking a really good look but she couldn't shake the disturbing feeling that she should know her from somewhere. Her memory wriggled and squirmed without success. The stranger's face kept refusing to be placed in a concrete context, like Hermione had never actually laid eyes on her before, but had heard a description, or seen a picture, or a likeness somewhere, a...

"... a photo," she murmured unconsciously, "or -"

"Or a reflection," the woman finished her own shaky thought. "Please lower the wand, Hermione. I will not harm you - it would be foolish. I would only be harming myself."

Hermione gaped.

"You... You are - "

"Yes," the woman said, " I am Hermione Granger."

* * *

"That's rubbish," said Hermione. "You're trying to tell me you're me, back from the future. Sorry, I'm not buying it. I have studied those things. You're nearly three times older than me so you'd have to come years back, which is impossible since the Time-Turner only works for small jumps. I'm not that gullible."

"The one you have is for small jumps," the guest agreed. "I, however, spent years on adjusting and improving it, until it finally became this one here." She pulled a chain from under her blouse, with ah hourglass-shaped medallion hanging from it. "It still has limits, of course. But it's considerably more powerful. Believe me when I say, _I have studied those things_, Hermione... rather longer than you have."

"Wait, now," Hermione objected. "Even if it were possible to travel years back, you'd know something like this simply isn't allowed, if you truly were me! If there is one single most foolish thing to do, in time travel, it is to meet yourself. You'd risk sinking into causality paradoxes so deep that the whole future might end up not happening. I know I'd simply never do something like this, so if you're telling me that I did it - that I'm doing it at the moment - sorry, can't believe it."

Most unexpectedly, the woman laughed.

"So this is my lecturing tone that Ronald keeps going on about? It is a very... educating experience... to see yourself from the side, like this."

"... Ronald?"

"Unimportant. We shouldn't be wasting time. Naturally, I expected you to have doubts. I know the way your thinking works, after all. If you do not believe I am who I say I am - "

"There must be thousands of ways to imitate somebody's face! Polyjuice potion, mimicry, metamorphing magic, or even unconventional methods like plastic surgery, make-up, disguise, whatever! Anything would be more possible than _me_ doing a stupid thing like going back in time to meet myself!"

"When you were little, Mom used to hold your hand every time when you had to cross a street, and you hated insisted you were old and responsible enough and could be trusted to cross a street on your own. You didn't believe it when you were told Santa Claus wasn't real, and you've never stopped trying to come up with some magical way for him to be real after all. You are worried that next year Harry will, maybe, ask you out since everyone seems to expect him to, and you have no idea how you want to feel about it..."

Hermione gaped at her, again.

"You may have... read my diary... or something," she mumbled.

"Which you don't keep, and you never have, Hermione, we both know that very well."

"I - "

"At the Runes exam earlier today, you nearly got your Futharks mixed up but you sorted it out in time. Just a few minutes ago, you lied to Parvati and Lavender that you weren't hungry because you wanted to be left alone for a while, to decide what to do with the Time-Turner. One of your major concerns is that Ron would want to use it to cheat at exams, or gambling."

"Enough!"

"Alright."

For a few second, they just glared at each other.

"I think you do believe me now, or at least are more willing to," the woman said, softly. "I think you'll keep arguing, but that'd be mostly stubborness and pride. I remember the time I used to be you, quite well. Anyway, I also know curiousity's eating at you with a strength you wouldn't care to admit. So to save time, this is what I suggest - I'll tell you why I am here, and you decide whether to believe me or not."

Hermione nodded, slowly.

"And, to avoid the silly feeling of addressing oneself, how about this - let me call you Hermione, and you call me Jean - "

"... my middle name," said both together, and then, also together, smiled a little bashfully.

* * *

"I come from six years ahead."

Hermione stared at her.

"You are - twenty? But - ," she felt awkward, "I mean - "

"I look older? I know. I am. Some parts of these six years... well, let me say, I've been going through them again and again. I was a little older than thirty, I think, when I stopped counting. There were more important things to think about. I think I'm not forty yet, but I may be wrong."

"The Time-Turner?"

"Indeed."

"Why - How?"

"This time next year, Voldemort will come back," Jean began. "He'll try to kill Harry. He won't succeed. But... another student died..."

Hermione noted how the future tense became past. She said nothing.

"Harry came to me, afterwards. I had the Time-Turner. He wanted to go back, to save the boy. We simply had to stop him from touching a certain object, the prize in a competition... I insisted that the future must be kept secret but Harry decided to tell the boy what would happen. As I expected, he did not believe us, he thought we were telling him lies to prevent him from winning. Harry Stunned him then - just to keep him from touching the Cup. That's all we did - and then we hid, and waited... But before we could reach our original time, we saw the other boy's body being carried out of the maze... There was a Death Eater in Hogwarts... he had followed the contestants... he had heard our conversation, Harry telling the other boy that Voldemort would kill him... and the Death Eater had killed the boy to stop him from talking. Harry had made it easy for him. The Death Eater had found his prey Stunned and helpless, he only had to finish him."

Jean made a small pause to catch her breath, and continued.

"Harry insisted that we try again, and I argued, pointed out so many ways things could go worng, but I agreed in the end. This tie we waited for the second Harry - the one from the first time going back - to finish his talk with the boy. We waited, in ambush, for the Death Eater. Unfortunately we made a mess of it, there was a fight, and Harry - that's the third Harry, the latest one - was hurt, very badly hurt. I nearly failed bringing him back to the place we started from, but I managed it at the last moment. Harry spent a few days recovering, and after that it was too late to try again, too much time had passed and the Time-Turner couldn't bring us that far back. Harry never forgave me, I think, for not going back alone while I still could... for not trying and trying again to save the boy... But I couldn't. Too many things had gone wrong already."

"It would have been madness," Hermione murmured. "To go back again... that would make it... _four_ of yourself at the same time and place... this is like gambling with the forces of nature... my head spins just thinking about it..."

"We could not save the boy," Jean said sadly. "The Time-Turner just made things worse."

"Jean, I'm sorry but... if this is meant to make me give it up... well, let me remind you that with Sirius and Buckbeak we did, in fact, manage to make things better..."

"Sirius..." Jean said. "Sirius, yes. I am not finished, Hermione. Listen."

"I am listening."

"Others will start dying, the year after next. A lot. Voldemort will gather his followers and lay a trap for Harry in the Ministry of Magic. The Order... well, you don't know what this is yet... Some people, loyal to Dumbledore, will go to help Harry in the Ministry. Voldemort's plan will fail, but at a price too high for Harry."

"Price?"

"Sirius Black will die there."

"Will... die," Hermione repeated and tried to picture Harry's face and the pain and the guilt and anger, and the helplessness it would hold, and suddenly got angry herself. After everything they had gone through to save Sirius, this is what the future held? Will die? _How was that fair?_

"We had the Time-Turner," Jean continued, back to past tense.

"You went back!"

Jean nodded.

"How else? Can you imagine Harry leaving Sirius to die when he had the means to save him? I agreed too fast, I'm afraid. I knew the risks and the chances we were taking, I knew how everything could go wrong in a frightful lot of ways, but I just couldn't imagine, then, a way for things to get worse. We went back, far enough, to leave a message to earlier Harry, inforing him of the trap. Harry knew about the Time-Turner so we weren't too concerned with causality, and we really told very little in our note. It was enough. Harry didn't go to the Ministry, there was no fight with the Death Eaters, and Sirius wasn't killed."

"Sounds good."

"You think? It all meant, also, that neither the Order nor Dumbledore had any reason to be in the Ministry that night. No one summoned the Aurors, and no one chased Voldemort and his Death Eaters away. They had plenty of time, undisturbed, to neutralize the essential protective spells, booby-trap every entrance and exit, call their own reinforcements. In the morning there was chaos. Those of the Ministry who weren't Voldemort supporters, were killed or Imperiused. The Minister for Magic was executed publicly, and the new regime announced..."

Jean pulled the hair back from her face, for the first time since she had appeared. There was a large red "M" on her left cheek.

"It stands for 'Mudblood'," she explained. "I am a servant, a kitchen-maid, in Malfoy's mansion. House elves are still in demand, but keeping Mudbloods as domestic help is the latest fashion. Servant work is the only thing we are allowed to do for a living, under the regime."  
Hermione gasped in sudden anger.

"You put up with this?"

"No. Of course I don't. As far as the resistence exists, I am a part of it..."

" 'As far as' meaning?"

"Hermione... Dumbledore was killed in the very first days of... the new order. The first time, Harry disappeared shortly afterward."

"The first time?"

"The rest of us... we fight, we haven't given up... but our spirit's dying down. Less people dare to oppose Voldemort every day. There is talk that he is about to end the secrecy, let the Muggles know about us and enslave them... and... I really hate to admit it but... a lot of wizards are secretly hoping to see this happen."

Jean paused again, gathering her thoughts.

"After the Ministry crisis it took us too long to get organized, and it was too late to use the Time-Turner to fix things. But I remembered quite clearly what was supposed to happen if we did not interfere the first time. Sirius died, yes, but Voldemort was stopped from taking over the wizarding world the following morning. I didn't know what would happen next in that timeline, but I was pretty sure there was no way the future would get worse than our meddling had made it. So I started my work on the Time-Turner. I was certain the night in the Ministry was the key event - the turning point. I had to find a way to go back there. I used the Time-Turner almost incessantly, to get enough time for my research. I met some remarkable people, scientists... Professor Vector was in the Resistance - she and Xeno Lovegood were the ones that helped me most..."

"Lovegood? Loony Luna's father?"

"Yes. We estimated and calculated every variable, every possible development. Or at least so we believed. You see, I finally managed to remove the safety restrictions on the Time-Turner. I found a way to make it work with years rather than mere hours. I did it - I went back to the night in the Ministry..."

Jean wrung her hands in desperation.

"I went back, not once, but many times. Once I went to warn Dumbledore. In this timeline, Voldemort was stopped but Sirius still died together with most of the Order, and Harry. The Ministry was in ruin, and the coup happened a few days later. Once, I tried to warn Sirius. This proved completely useless, it changed nothing, he didn't listen to me at all. Once I tried to talk to my earlier version, that Hermione who had gone, with Harry, a few hours back in time to try and save Sirius. I decided to chance it and face myself. No use. Harry either wouldn't believe me, or decided that saving Sirius was worth everything that followed, he even fought me to prevent me from stopping them. This was the worst timeline of all. Instead of sending a note to his earlier self like before, Harry decided to go to the Ministry and fight the Death Eaters together with his younger version, and was killed there. Hermione, whatever I did, things kept going from bad to worse. The coup happened anyway, and Sirius died. Only, after the last change, Harry was dead too. That was when I stopped going back to that night and turned, again, to my research. It was clear I had made a grand mistake somewhere."

"You can't play God, Jean," said Hermione. "You can't just presume you've got the right to decide the fate of the entire wizarding world, on your own."

Jean smiled bitterly.

"It took me years to realize that. This time I didn't have Vector and Lovegood to help me with the calculations, and I used the Time-Turner like mad between my kitchen duties; I analyzed, and I racked my brains, and cried, and drew charts and diagrams and compared variables and verified results until my head wanted to explode. In the end, I believe, I found where I'd been wrong. The turning point, the key event, you see... it is not the night in the Ministry."

"Where, then?"

"Here, Hermione. _Now_."

* * *

"But - "

"You said it yourself. The fate of the world is too big to be given to one person to decide. And I can't, I _will not_ restrain myself from interfering when the life of someone I care about is at stake. If I have the means, I'll use it. I know. I _did_."

Hermione said nothing.

"One day, when I was about to give up," Jean said, "I said to myself, 'I wish I had never touched the wretched thing!' And then I saw it - there was a way to fix things by going back. But I had never gone far enough back. I had never gone back to here, now. Without what you've just heard, you had almost decided to keep it. Think again, now."

"I... think I'll give it up after all," said Hermione. "Professor McGonagall seems to think it's best, too, and it seems things can really go horribly wrong when you use it. Mind you, I'm not quite sure I believe you, still. I'm just being reasonable. But in case it's all true, what about everything you told me? If I remember it, won't it affect the future? I mean, since I know what's coming, I may decide to do something to change it or..."

"You just give it back to McGonagall, and don't worry," said Jean. "If you don't have it, I'm not going to have it either, so I won't be able to come back from the future and tell you things. I will not even exist, as I am. You will grow up to become a happier me, I hope. Don't be sad, Hermione. You are, to me, right now, what so many people wish they had, and never get, and what I thought I had many times, but was wrong every time, until now."

"And what is that?"

"A_ second chance_, for real" said Jean, and smiled.

As the Hogwarts express pulled out of the station some hours later, Hermione gave Harry and Ron some surprising news.  
"I went to see Professor McGonagall this morning, just before breakfast. I've decided to drop Muggle Studies."  
"But you passed your exam with three hundred and twenty per cent!" said Ron.  
"I know," said Hermione, "but I can't stand another year like this one. That Time-Turner, it was driving me mad. I've handed it in. Without Muggle Studies and Divination, I'll be able to have a normal timetable again."

There seemed to be something else, too - a vague shadow, a dream, or a reflection of a memory lingered shortly, and then faded to the background of her mind: her reasoning had felt perfectly right just s few hours earlier, but she couldnt quite remember what exactly her thoughts had been. Ah well, did it matter? If it was something important, it would surely come to her at some point.


End file.
